Fox Mobile Studios’ Brainstorm: Branded Entertainment Part 2
Branded mobile entertainment just got a wintergreen punch with Fox Mobile Studios’ Brainstorm, an eight-episode scripted comedy series for mobile and online platforms that revolves around Altoids, “The Curiously Strong Mints.” The entire series launches today ( Monday, September 28). 
In the series, FMS created a storyline that integrates Altoids; Yoghurt, a struggling advertising agency works on the Altoids account, with a cast of quirky characters including the agency’s new freelancer- self-proclaimed ad-wizard Rock Shanz.
This is the first branded entertainment endeavor from Fox Mobile Studios, a unit of Fox Mobile Group. FMG is a division of Fox Entertainment Group, which is wholly-owned by News Corporation. Altoids is owned by Wrigley U.S. Gum and Mints, which has operations in more than 40 countries and distributes its world-famous brands in more than 180 countries. Wrigley is a subsidiary of Mars, Inc., a $30-billion, family-owned company.
MobilizedTV spoke with both Michael Wallen, vice president/creative director for Fox Mobile Studios in Part I, and now, in Part 2, with Steven Amato, a partner in Omelet, a hybrid creative and entertainment agency that produced Brainstorm.
MobilizedTV: Omelet is described as a hybrid entertainment and creative agency. What does this mean?
Amato: We have a pedigree in traditional advertising as our background: Shervin Samari and I were creative partners at TBWA/Chiat/Day and Ryan Fey was PR director of North Americas for TBWA/Chiat/Day. I was a playwright by way of NYC and came out here to do entertainment and found myself working on pilots for networks. At that point, I realized all the decisions were made by brands. So I had my Jerry McGuire moment and decided to figure out what all this advertising was. I tried to do entertainment at TBWA/Chiat/Day; my partners and I thought there would be a great opportunity to create great branded entertainment. The opportunity came up to work with Fox Mobile Studios on cross-platform branded entertainment, and this proved our business model.
Half our work is work-for-hire advertising. The rest is the creation of entertainment or intellectual property that we own or co-own. Brainstorm, which was a work-for-hire, is a perfect execution of why we started Omelet. This was Fox’s idea; they brought us on to collaboratively develop and bring our assets to bear as it were on developing. scripting, integration and doing the marketing and distribution as well.
Is this your first mobile production?
This would be our first mobile content production. We’ve done mobile advertising but not pure content.
Our first mobile assignment was for Vivendi Mobile to talk about launching a new mobile game. We created a little piece of content around the game. It was actually very similar in terms of an experience. It’s a fuzzy line for us between marketing and entertainment. We feel marketing should be entertainment. If you’re not entertaining them, people won’t go out and buy the product.
What are the parameters, aesthetically and logistically, of producing for mobile?
In the case of Brainstorm, we had the opportunity to work with Fox, so we really didn’t see any limitations. We really shot this as premium as any thing. We wanted to shoot something that could end up on TV or end up on a phone. We didn’t put any limitations on it. We wanted to shoot something that was entertaining no matter where you saw it. We wanted that level of polish and attention to detail in the script to deliver this amazing entertainment experience.
I consume a great deal of video on my iPhone. I watch [long-form content like] movies, and I feel no limitations with what you can experience. What’s a great story? How do we capture it? Knowing that people will experience this in many ways. I’m super excited about the fact that TV is now on mobile. It fits my lifestyle more than anything else. I spend so much time with my mobile devices. I’m always on the go and consume so much more media aand video now that I have an iPhone. It’s a great user experience and. I don’t feel limited by the size. I’m definitely an early adopter but I see it going this direction.
Who was the crew who shot it?
We brought on partners of ours, a company called Standard Quality, who are shooters and directors, but we oversaw all the production.Ben Peyser is the director/DP and Silas Howard is the director. We went with the Sony EX-3 camera.
What was the most challenging aspect of creating Brainstorm?
We shot it on location at Omelet, which is in the Wiltern Theater building where we have three floors. We had to move everything from one floor to create the shooting set. But it pays off: it looks like an ad agency because it is an ad agency.
We open every episode with a quick 30 Rock wipe of the exterior of the building and then get right to the action. Each segment is between four and six minutes. I definitely think that to create a well written show you have to build characters you can have a relationship with and have a sense of structure. And it has to be longer than a minute, otherwise it feels like a sketch. We built a structured, short-form experience for an audience that grew up on sitcoms, to give them a tiny user experience of that. What’s interesting about Brainstorm is that it’s got an arc. You can watch it from the first to the last episode and have a cathartic release. Or you can experience one episode in the middle and still have a great experience. When you take that and put it into the whole, it works nicely. We built it as a modular episodic experience.
Fox is delivering the future of mobile entertainment. Mike Wallen is a visionary. They have a lucky thing going on over there and it’s blast working with him.
Tags: Brainstorm, branded entertainment, Fox Mobile Studios, iPhone, Michael Wallen, mobile advertising, mobile content, mobile platform, Mobile Series, mobile TV, MobilizedTV, Omelet, Ryan Fey, Shervin Samari, Standard Quality, Steven Amato, TBWA/Chiat/Day
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under Content, Devices, Home Feature, Monetizing Mobile.
